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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Researchers at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Lab have developed a new type of optical memory that stores data by transferring light from rare-earth element atoms embedded in a solid material to nearby quantum defects. They published their study in Physical Review Research.
The problem that the researchers aim to solve is the diffraction limit of light in standard CDs and DVDs. Current optical storage has a hard cap on data density because each single bit can't be smaller than the wavelength of the reading/writing laser.
The researchers propose bypassing this limit by stuffing the material with rare-earth emitters, such as magnesium oxide (MgO) crystals. The trick, called wavelength multiplexing, involves having each emitter use a slightly different wavelength of light. They theorized that this would allow cramming far more data into the same storage footprint.
The researchers first had to tackle the physics and model all the requirements to build a proof of concept. They simulated a theoretical solid material filled with rare-earth atoms that absorb and re-emit light. The models then showed how the nearby quantum defects could capture and store the returned light.
One of the fundamental discoveries was that when a defect absorbs the narrow wavelength energy from those nearby atoms, it doesn't just get excited – its spin state flips. Once it flips, it is nearly impossible to revert, meaning those defects could legitimately store data for a long time.
While it's a promising first step, some crucial questions still need answers. For example, verifying how long those excited states persist is essential. Details were also light on capacity estimates – the scientists touted "ultra-high-density" but didn't provide any projections against current disc capacities. Yet, despite the remaining hurdles, the researchers are hyped, calling it a "huge first step."
Of course, turning all this into an actual commercial storage product will likely take years of additional research and development.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by janrinok on Wednesday October 30 2024, @06:50AM (8 children)
I am having a problem finding a specific use for such a storage medium.
As others have pointed out, optical disks have fairly long lives but they are far from being permanent. It also implies an additional task of detecting when they are failing so that a reasonable update/rewrite policy can be implemented.
Cost wise, I cannot see them competing with the cost and convenience of a thumb drive. I can find ads for 1TB thumb drives now although I tend not to buy anything over 64Gb. SSDs seem to be at least as reliable as the hard drives of a decade or more ago.
I also find it hard to imagine what software I have that will still be relevant in 30 years time, So that suggests that the new drives will be more for archival usage rather than regular storage e.g. images, perhaps personal documents, etc
Finally, just as with batteries, 'improved ' storage devices are touted at regular intervals. Very few of them actually appear some time later as viable products. Scientifically it is a neat trick, and that is where I have an interest in this story, but now show me what you can actually do with a working product.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by janrinok on Wednesday October 30 2024, @06:53AM (6 children)
I wrote that and then burst out laughing as soon as I had posted it. This site is based on Perl code that was written in the late 1990s!
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday October 30 2024, @08:56AM
So you are pre-ordering discussed storage media now? Curious researcher wants to know.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday October 30 2024, @03:03PM (4 children)
The thing is though that if you want extremely long lifetimes, there are other things you can do with lasers that will give you that, for example burning holes into aluminum or copper plates. Those will last more or less until the end of time in many cases, there are those metal codices found in the Middle East from thousands of years ago that would be readable, except that nobody seems to know how to decode them. Which is arguably the bigger problem. Sure, we can etch things into stone, or metal, but what can we do to ensure that they can still be read in 50-100 years? Just over the last 50 years,we went through several versions of the Floppy disk drive, several versions of the HDD, several iterations of optical media and I'm not even sure I want to estimate how many types of tape, not to mention Zip disks and flash cards.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday October 30 2024, @06:32PM (3 children)
My public library used to have two rows of microfilm and microfiche machines and they got rid of all of them and now have a single computer hooked up to what looks like a microscope as its replacement.
I think they got rid of all the microfilm except for the very local (down the road) newspaper archive.
They used to have microfilms of numerous magazines including Scientific American and these 35 mm film rolls dated back to IIRC either right before or right after WWII and the quality was fine when I was looking at them in the 80s. Some of the oldest newspaper film rolls at my library would be 80 years old now.
Interesting sociology where during summer break during the day, the film readers were 90%+ genealogy old people and I was the only young person there. I read all the Scientfic American Amateur Scientist articles on microfilm and the Mathematical Recreations column and in the early 80s they had a possibly short lived computer column.
The newest nicest microfilm machine (in, lets say, 1983, maybe 1986 don't recall exactly) had what amounts to a Xerox printer hooked up where the light from the microfilm directly developed on the photocopier drum for IIRC exactly three nickels per page. I still have some microfilm printouts, but you wouldn't know it, they look exactly like a 1980s xerox copier, which, I guess, they were in a fundamental sense.
IIRC there were multiple pages per 35 mm frame, it wasn't one magazine page per 35mm frame. At least 2 maybe was it 8? Microfiche were a different kettle of fish and on a single large slide the size of a postcard you could quite easily hold an entire 100+ page magazine in row-column format.
For kids these days, magazine columns were kind of like a once-a-month blogpost they'd print out and mail to you for a fee. Oh shit I guess in 2024 I have to explain to kids these days what a blogpost was, well imagine a tiktok but for literate people.
Portable readers for microfilm and fiche existed and I always wanted one as a kid to do basically what we use a Kindle for today, except somewhat less conveniently. IIRC some technical magazines like QST, QEX, maybe Circuit Cellar used to have a little ad in the back explaining you could obtain issues on fiche for a nominal fee, imagine having the entire print run of QST magazine in a tiny little box on your desk... Ironically ARRL sold QST on CDROM sets around Y2K and at one time or another I had most of those. QEX had better articles LOL.
Imagine humanity when everyone has cheap desktop access to entire libraries of human knowledge. Well, instead of that we got Rule 34 and bots and ads. But the future sure LOOKED great, at least from a distance.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday October 31 2024, @08:07PM (1 child)
Some years ago I had a motorcycle workshop manual on microfiche, so I bought a small used microfiche reader to look at it. No idea what happened to that. The magnification and fidelity on it wasn't great, to the point that the small technical details I needed from the diagrams couldnt really be discerned.
If I was in charge of that library I would have insisted those microfilms were digitized before they were got rid of, at least the ones that were out of copyright. I hope they weren't just thrown in the garbage!
"rancid randy has a dialogue with herself[...] Somebody help him!" -- Anonymous Coward.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday November 01 2024, @01:54PM
They do have site licenses for newspaper.com and ancestry.com so that's probably why they chucked them.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday November 03 2024, @12:27AM
Many courts still hold a lot of data on microfilm. If you want copies of deeds recorded 40 years ago for instance, you might have to put in a request for the data to be retrieved and wait for it.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 30 2024, @06:07PM
I think they sell the "overall system" not the media or material.
The broadcasts techs I shared a coffee maker with some years back REALLY liked the Sony TB optical carts a decade or two ago, they were tough enough to be "broadcast tech proof" and you could certainly drive around town with one in the trunk or drop it or mail it and it would continue to work. I imagine the reputation scales linearly with failure rate, maybe people working at a site with a couple dead carts, would hate that tech. Such is the case with all storage technologies, greatest thing since sliced bread until the day it fails.
I was thinking just a few minutes ago about applications and obviously the A/V broadcast techs and broadcast engineers loved them, but maybe backup servers are a good idea. LTO is cheaper per byte but restoral times could be VERY long because its a linear ribbon. Flash costs too much per byte and is hard to toss NVME sticks in a box and ship to the archive site. Faster than using AWS storage and doesn't use the expensive internet bandwidth. Yes I think this would be very nice connected to a backup server, maybe thru the NAS/SAN, maybe keep the backup server at a disaster recovery facility.
In theory I think you could rip the guts out of a Sony ODA optical cartridge and stick a bunch of flash in it and replace the optical ODA drive with a USB-C port, but it would end up costing maybe 4 times as much money. Going the opposite direction LTO is cheaper per tape byte but the drives cost as much as a (very cheap) new car so there is a crossover point. I don't know how much TB-class optical drives cost although I know the media is "somewhat cheap". The broadcast techs never made a big deal about it, I would assume a TB-class optical drive costs "much less" than the professional cameras and lenses, which unfortunately IS a lot of money.